ABSTRACT
‘Have you seen his photograph? The man is an affected fop’. That’s how Jason King is crisply dismissed in ‘Zenia’, one episode of the early 1970s series that carried his name, and it identifies economically, if abusively, two key characteristics of this strangest of television action heroes. First, it judges King on the basis of a photograph, but that’s wholly appropriate given the way the series centres so unswervingly on the man’s appearance. Episode after episode foregrounds King’s lavish and meticulous clothing, places him in front of mirrors, features photographs of him on magazine covers and book jackets, and includes dialogue commenting on his looks and style. King was not so much a person as an image, a conglomeration of signs. Second, and consequently, the remark calls into question King’s masculinity. He is undeniably a fop, as well as a dandy, an aesthete and (to quote the episode ‘Nadine’) ‘an epicurean peacock’, and these are traits that have an ambiguous relationship with conventional codes of masculinity. Those codes customarily see masculinity as natural, non-manufactured, stemming directly and inevitably from maleness, while foppery (and how satisfying it is to be able to use that word in a collection of academic essays) is very much a performance, a revelling in affectation, a conscious manipulation of artifice. Foppery is never very far away from effeminacy, and effeminacy often blurs into homosexuality. Yet this particular fop is also a stud, with women both on-screen in the episodes and off-screen in the audience finding King a sexual magnet of immense and irresistible proportions.
